Students gathered around the table, a spread of diverse foods laid in front of them. They all have brought something to share, something to contribute. But this dinner is not like many others. Everything shared at this dinner has come from less than 100 miles away. Every egg, herb and vegetable was locally sourced and purchased as part of an experiment.
Chip Oscarson, Associate Dean of Undergraduate Education and former Sustainability Committee member, hosted this dinner for his students to help them develop closer relationships with the place they live and learn how that impacts their choices at the grocery store.
He did this in the name of sustainability.
Sustainability seems like a foreign concept for many people. They care about the environment and want to protect it, but many have no idea where to start.
Bremen Leak, associate director of sustainability and continuity at BYU, was hired to help the university be more sustainable and resilient.
“Sustainability as a concept involves three realms or sectors,” Leak said. “We’re talking about the environment, the economy and society.”
It is about living and operating in a way that allows each to flourish while not prioritizing one over the other, he added. Individuals must involve the earth, people and organizations in order to make noticeable and lasting changes.
While those changes are often made through operational adjustments, they are also made through greater efforts to fund research and prioritize student learning about living and working in a sustainable way.
At BYU, students also find a divine purpose for becoming more sustainable. In a conference talk for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Presiding Bishop Gérald Caussé counseled members of the Church to be better stewards over the earth.
“Beyond being simply a scientific or political necessity, the care of the earth and of our natural environment is a sacred responsibility entrusted to us by God, which should fill us with a deep sense of duty and humility,” he said.
For the past few years, BYU has made sustainability a bigger focus. With actions such as creating the Office of Sustainability, undergoing the Sustainability Tracking, Assessment and Rating System report and creating a Global Environmental Studies minor, BYU is emphasizing the importance of stewardship for the earth.
The Sustainability Tracking, Assessment and Rating System report, a system to rate the sustainability of universities, included several subcategories in its analysis. Three of those subcategories are main focuses of BYU: academics, operations and campus engagement.
Operation and engagement efforts are often easy to see, such as encouraging rideables on campus or removing dining trays to reduce food waste. Academic efforts, however, may be harder to spot without a tangible evaluation.
Involved in those efforts is the creation of more classes, lecture series and curriculum that integrates sustainable ideas and the more religious concept of stewardship into every area of study.
BYU recently held the For the Benefit of the World event, where educators and researchers presented their projects as part of a campus-wide research conference. The conference encouraged “interdisciplinary collaboration on global challenges,” according to the website.
This conference was a big step in connecting departments and studies to their appropriate area of sustainability research.
Oscarson has seen a lot of change in his past 19 years at BYU. When he arrived, sustainability was mostly relegated to the life sciences, but it has recently expanded to nearly every program.
“We need to lean into (our unique theology) and explore that in our curriculum,” Oscarson said. “Sometimes that’s dedicated classes but, even more than that, it needs to be sprinkled through everything that we do.”
Our belief in religious stewardship can and should be integrated into every class, he said. Student engagement has recently increased as well, calling for a greater need for educational support, curriculum and programs.
“There's incredible student interest in these kinds of issues. They understand from a moral standpoint about how important it is to be involved and be thinking about these things,” Oscarson said.
With three associated majors and three minors, more students are participating in sustainability related fields.
"Students are asking a lot of questions about the environment. They’re very excited to find out that the restored gospel has a lot to say about their moment in time here in the 21st century," George Handley, coordinator of global environmental studies, said.
The scriptures, especially the Doctrine & Covenants, talk frequently about understanding and appreciating the world around us, he said. BYU’s efforts for the sustainability programs are built around those principles.
“We have a responsibility in terms of our academic offerings to our students,” he said. “We really also have a responsibility to build it into our practice.”
New academic curriculum and real efforts to make sustainability a priority are moving the work forward at BYU. At the Rollins Center, hidden in the back room, students can find the Stewardship Lab.
The lab was created to focus on supporting and facilitating research. Alison Asay, the lab director, works with students and faculty on projects from many different schools.
"The Stewardship Lab focuses on interdisciplinary research and collaboration. It’s not just the life sciences’ job to solve environmental problems — we need people from other disciplines to help implement solutions," Asay said.
The lab doesn’t just focus on the natural environment, but includes the social, human-built environment.
Asay, who graduated from BYU in 2020, was one of the cofounders of the Student Sustainability Initiative, which helped lead to the creation of the Office of Sustainability.
"This work has been building for decades. Changes in leadership and student efforts aligned to make this happen now," Asay said.
The lab currently is working on several projects, including a trip to Ecuador with the engineering and biology departments. The trip is in collaboration with a Waorani tribe to help develop better, more sustainable infrastructure.
“The students, from deliberately different disciplines, will aim to make any future construction minimally environmentally intrusive, architecturally appropriate and culturally sensitive,” the lab’s website stated.
The academic efforts of BYU aim to engage students and promote research. Faculty and staff work hand in hand with students to promote this growing development.
“The environment isn’t something that ever has to be solved,” Oscarson said. “It’s a relationship that we’re always in.”